DrungoHazewood

The Chris Davis game was awesome, but I wasn't so much watching it all the way through as I was checking in on radio/TV/internet over the several weeks it took to play. If I'm at the park and it goes into extras it's gotta be an epic situation for me to stay and then drive two hours home when it ends at 2am. If it's like The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and the game is going to last 3000 innings through hurricanes and supernatural events and ancient Native American chiefs coming back from the dead to play in the 1700th inning, then I'm sticking around.

Probably on the whole they're smaller, but also different. Fences started out just marking the boundary of the property, and often teams weren't flush with cash so the lot they built on was often small and irregularly shaped. So parks often had very short foul lines but other parts were very deep. For example, League Park in Cleveland was 375 to left, 410 to LC, 460 to center, but only 340 to RC and 290 down the RF line. The RF area was bounded by a street, and the Indians (then the NL Spiders) certainly didn't have the money in 1891 to pay Cleveland to move the street. In the 1880s the team now known as the Cubs played in a park that had at least a few dimensions under 200'. The Polo Grounds were just over 250' down the lines. But when Braves Field opened in Boston the dimensions were 402-402-440-402-402. Eight homers were hit there the first year, I believe all of them were inside-the-park. But I do wish that baseball would at least enforce the rules already on the books (since the 50s all parks are supposed to be 330' or more down the lines and 400' to center, I'm not sure 10% of parks built since then meet those minimums), but would prefer significantly longer distances and minimums in the gaps. But we will probably never go back to the triple and ISTP homer rates of the deadball era because outfielders are so much better.

Of course baseball hasn't changed much of any rules in over a century and home runs have gone from two a week to two a game, while Willie Keeler once struck out twice in a season and I'm pretty sure last year Chris Davis once struck out seven times in a single batting practice.

If they banned shifts in 1880 the 1B/2B/3B would all be required to stand within a few feet of their base. Maybe we should try that.

According to bb-ref he started one game, went six innings allowing two hits, no walks, no runs, while striking out six. Extrapolating that out to a full season of 36 starts he would be 36-0, 0.00 ERA, with 216 innings, 216 strikeouts, just 72 hits allowed and no walks at all. Works out to a WHIP of 0.333. Even if he's only 80-90% that good he's a Cy Young shoo-in, so let's give it a shot!

Runner on second is treating the symptom. The disease is 9-inning games that take as long as the 3:50 Oeschger-Cadore 26-inning game. Since 2015 there have been 231(!) nine-inning games as long as or longer than that 26-inning game a century ago. If you want normal extra inning games, then fix baseball so that a typical game is closer to two hours than 3:15. The only way "more baseball is always better" makes any sense is for people who have baseball as the only valuable thing to do with their time. That's not 99% of the population. For everyone else they just leave or go to bed, and don't watch the ads and don't buy the concessions so there's no business incentive for eternal games.

How about take a page out of the movie theater playbook and have sections that are reconfigured with big, comfortable, reclining chairs? A Montgomery Burns sun-obscurer so the day games aren't so Death Valley hot. Move the fences back 25'. Rope off a section of deepest CF for standing room. Seats on top of the warehouse. Convert a section of seats into a standing terrace for the Orioles Ultras.

I find it hard to believe that anyone is in favor of increasing taxes so that they can hand billionaires free places to do business. I guess that's why most of the plans are structured around things like tourism taxes and lotteries, not straight up tax increases. But Corn is right, economic sense is almost never the determining factor here. It's running enough ballot initiatives with enough hand-waiving until one finally gets 50.1% of the vote. Exactly what I was thinking. That would be the ultimate Lerner revenge for MASN, wouldn't it? Probably been a while since a team's affiliate had a nicer ballpark than their parent organization. I'm pretty sure I'd never go to OPACY to watch someone else's affiliate. I would if they got an Atlantic League team. It would be fun to have 10 times the revenues of everyone else in the league for once.

I don't know the numbers, but I'm going to guess that across the league players would steal first about twice a month. @Can_of_corn, you have nothing to worry about. Teams don't make roster decisions based on inside-the-park homers or balks or catchers interference or the likelihood of turning a triple play, which would be similar in frequency to this. I think for throws to first I'd make the rule that each throw to first that doesn't pick off the runner, the pitcher is charged a ball on the batter. I'm not going to automatically be against your foul ball rule, but 10 is an awful lot. I don't think a typical batter has a single at bat all year with 10 foul balls. Instead of cloning Mark Trumbo and playing him in center, I'd have a real, hard rule that all parks built after today have to have LF/RF/CF/RF/LF dimensions meeting a minimum standard significantly larger than the average park today. I'd give teams freedom to build the park as they like, but something like the lines have to be at least 300', but otherwise those five dimensions have to add up to at least 1900'. So 350-385-425-380-360 would do it. So would 310-410-475-375-330. Then we'd have similar coverage to Trumbo playing in a current field, but with really good fielders doing athletic things.

Outstanding performances are exciting. But we see less and less of those as the quality of the league increases. Notice that with the reduction in overt PED use, despite the highest HR rates ever we don't really have players regularly approaching Ruth/Maris, much less Bonds. Nobody hits .350, pitchers are used less and less and never approach records. There were as many 15 strikeout games 20-50 years ago as today. As for walks, I sometimes wonder if baseball couldn't have taken some other approach. In the very early game walks weren't a thing. The whole point of the game was for the pitcher to deliver a ball that the batter could put in play and cool stuff happens. With little or no protective gear and catchers standing 10 or more feet behind the plate it was difficult to throw really hard. There were limits on snapping your wrist, or keeping a stiff elbow like cricket, all to keep pitchers from getting too overpowering, to keep the game moving along with lots of action. But someone always pushes the limits, and eventually they came up with the concept of called balls, and along with that walks. Maybe if they'd instead done something else... like after X number of unreachable pitches you had to toss the ball up underhanded to the batter. Then there is no walks, almost no strikeouts, and the game evolves as the early founders intended: a battle between fielders and batters. Also the side benefit of reducing pitcher injuries by 95%. I know, I know, the way baseball actually evolved is perfect and all other ways are dumb.

But the O's batters will also be hitting 5% fewer homers.

I could see the players who emphasize contact being replaced by 22-year-old Mark Trumbos who can hit the ball 5% farther. I know you're joking, but I'd be in favor of shrinking gloves by a few mm a year for a few years to see what happens. Two reasons why it took forever for the "striking out is a mortal sin" thing to go away: in the deadball era fields were horrible, and gloves were tiny. So it was much harder to convert a ball in play into an out. If you did away with gloves and groundskeepers strikeouts would go down 50% overnight.

Deadening the ball without doing anything about contact or outfield dimensions is basically just going to reduce runs by a few percent. If they're right, what's going to happen is 2020's .245/.322/.418 line is going to become more like .240/.320/.409, with runs scored dropping to 4.4 or 4.5 from 4.65. While strikeouts continue apace. Although it could be a little more severe than that. It's not like long fly balls will be the only thing affected. There will be slightly lower exit velocities on almost all balls in play. Maybe a little more 2015 than 2018. There is still almost no increased incentive to pick contact hitters over power hitters. For that they're going to have to pick several of: move the fences back 30 or 50 feet, deaden the ball more than this, move the mound back or have pitchers pitch from flat ground, or make the bats bigger.

Perhaps if you had two players who were nearly identical. One a shortstop who created 50 runs with his offense and saved 5 with his glove, the other created 45 and saved 10, you could argue that you'd be very slightly better off with the latter. But in almost any real life case things won't be close enough to use that as the differentiator. Clearly Jeter's overall performance was more valuable than Belanger's, even with a -200 run penalty for being Derek Jeter.

I think technically a run saved is worth a tiny bit more than a run scored, primarily because you're lowing the run environment and making each of your team's runs worth more. But in the end it's small enough to not really care about. I suppose you could make it a philosophy to take advantage of this by always favoring defense and pitching over offense, but it would be awfully hard to tease out that it had a tangible impact.

Yea, he might be (have been) someone who could throw 300 innings and not die.

It's probably a good thing that society has mostly backed off from physically destroying people for sport. MMA excluded... But we do miss out on some epic performances. I'm sure there are still a handful of pitchers from each generation who could start 40+ games and go 300+ innings, but we'll never know, since that workload obliterates the arms of almost all the pitchers who try it. Especially in a max-effort context. It might also be fun to see race cars going 300 mph with huge jet blowers providing downforce and the drivers always on the edge of blacking out. The NFL Films' Greatest Spinal Cord Injuries of the 1980s had its charms.

Slingin' Sammy Baugh was -14 on TD-INT. His rookie year ('37) he led the league in completions, attempts, yards, TD%, yards/attempt, yards/catch and yards/game, in a year where he was 81-for-171 in 11 games. So in an average game he was 7-for-16 for 102 yards, with less than one TD and more than one INT. That was arguably the best QB in the league. It's also fun to look at old NFL kicking stats. In 1940 the Cleveland Rams were 1-of-7 on field goals, a 23-yarder. And 16-of-25 on extra points. It looks like the 1944 Bears didn't attempt a field goal all year, and that same year the Packers, Brooklyn Tigers, and the Chicago-Pittsburgh Cardinal-Steelers (war thing?) didn't make a field goal all year.

Yes, and no. Yes, Tawny Kitaen was super hot. But also, she was arrested for spousal abuse of Mr. Finley in 2002, and she really didn't age well.

So, alphabetical?

I think that Koufax had a very fortunate coincidence of era, park, and his peak. If you put him in a context of a five-man rotation and the '97 Orioles park/league he probably peaks out at just over 20 wins and an ERA in the mid-2.00s. So... somewhat better than Mike Mussina but with 2/3rds the career length. Although maybe he sticks around longer because of modern medicine and less overuse. Or... his teams look at him walking 5-6 per nine and throwing in the mid 90s and turn him into a closer and he ends up somewhere between Randy Myers and Billy Wagner.

As has been the case every day for the last 23 years, the answer is "three years behind where Coco the Monkey would have gotten us." Still can't believe they didn't have that firesale in mid-2014. Corn... is that the right color for biting sarcasm?

Saberhagen, Pettitte, Oswalt, Hudson, Hershiser, Hernandez, Hamels, Finley, Cone, Buerhle.

By JAWS (which balances bb-ref peak and career WAR) they're all in the 64 (Cone) to 109 (Felix) range of all time starting pitchers. 80%+ of the pitchers above Cone are in the Hall, but below that things drop off. The 70s have 2/10 in Cooperstown, the 80s just Koufax, the 90s only Grimes and Whitey, the 100s Dizzy and Eppa Rixey. 60s are 3/10, 50s six, and 40s seven. The 30s are only 4/10, but that's because of three obscure 19th century guys and Verlander/Greinke/Kershaw who are all almost locks. So most of this list is in the range where 20% of pitchers get in the Hall. So they'll need a narrative or a champion.

Would it be a cop-out to say all of them are separated by less than the margin of error? Pettitte is probably ahead by a nose, Saberhagen perhaps the best peak. But Pettitte is the one who admitted to the PEDs, and Saberhagen alternated good and blah seasons. Every one of them has a career value between 49-62 in Fangraphs and bb-ref WAR. Peak seasons around 6-7 wins.